Exhibition & Royal Visit – Princess Anne

On Friday we celebrated the opening of the new Ulster University building and we had the absolute honour of displaying our work to be shown to Princess Anne.

We had known for quite some time that we were going to be meeting a VIP but we had no idea that it would be royalty. We were very lucky and got the chance to meet and speak to Princess Anne about or University experience and our major project.

The experience on Friday was absolutely amazing and quite surreal if i’m honest we set up out work over two machines in the hub. On one machine we had a video play through of the snippets from the project production and the explorable region of the scene. The other machine had the set up of the Oculus and an executable build that would allow people throughout the day to try it out.

Over the course of the day many different people tried out our interview experience and this proved to be useful user experience research as we found that there were things people done in common and other things that were unique to the user.

Some of the feedback was great and this made us really excited about the project as we can still make it so much better. It was a boost of productivity for us I reckon as it really refreshed our minds finding out what other people thought about the interview experience.

Common behaviour trends that we noticed when people were using the Oculus was as follows –

No one immediately knew that they were able to move around in a 360 degree movement to see everything around them most people stood still staring directly ahead until instructed to move so this taught us that we will need some sort of guide to help the user.

Feedback was as follows –

People thought the Seamus Heany sequence was amazing and that it really added to the experience.

The particles were commented on again and again.

We were told that we really pulled it off with this type of documentary storytelling in VR.

The experience was beautiful.

People thought it was a shock when the floor platform disappeared at a certain stage in the sequence.

Certain fades caused people to think the experience was over when it wasn’t.